Introduction

The best place on earth is in the back of a theater. It's the aisle behind the last row of seats. The space is a little narrow, and the carpet has worn a bit thin. It's called “the Playwright's Alley,” and it's where the writer lives during the opening night of a new show. It's where a nervous and excited author shifts, paces, bites his nails and cheers like a fool while the actors onstage speak his words and perform his actions, moving the audience between the stage and that back row to laugh, cry and lean forward in delighted anticipation. There are hundreds of these alleys in the United States—from Broadway to Seattle, from the giant auditorium at Lincoln Center to the smallest ninety-nine-seat hole-in-the-wall in West Hollywood. It's the place where a writer sees his dreams and obsessions come true. “The Playwright's Alley” is a playwright's home.

The journey to that home is often a long and arduous one, filled with danger and disappointment. There are lonely hours at the typewriter and discouraging trips to the mailbox. There are frustrating attempts at rewrites and torturous hours in the rehearsal halls. There is the slim chance of greatness and the daunting prospect of disaster. But if you have talent, courage, determination—and the ability to grasp and manipulate the skills of this most demanding and rewarding profession—you can reach that glorious alley. Talent will out. You will find your home and fill the house.

I've been writing drama for ten years now, and I've had the good fortune to be produced by some of the finest theaters in this country: Manhattan Theatre Club, Yale Repertory Theater, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, Portland Stage, The Denver Center Theater Company, Florida Studio Theater, The Empty Space and dozens of others in cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle and San Francisco. I've had a lot of luck, and I've made a good many mistakes. But I've learned from my mistakes, and I've written better plays because of what I've learned. One of the truths I've come to know is that there are rules that all successful playwrights live by. True, there are many sorts of plays and many sorts of rules—but a playwright has to believe in certain dramatic and theatrical principles, and my life in the theater has taught me the following:

I believe in audiences.

I believe in inspiration.

I believe in craft.

I believe in Aristotle.

I believe the first duty of any play is to interest, engage and delight its spectators.

I believe all plays are mystery plays.

I believe in the three-part structure.

I believe in beginnings, middles and ends.

I believe in strong stories with strong characters who want and need and act.

I believe in protagonists, antagonists, goals and obstacles.

I believe that concrete goals are stronger than abstract ones.

I believe in dramatic tension and suspense.

I believe we learn from the plays of the past.

I believe all good plays contain character/conflict/action/ideas.

I believe all good plays contain secrets, sex, love, money, power, ideas, the potential for crime, the possibility of death, and a sense of theatricality.

I believe all good plays are about human nature and the questions of our hearts.

I believe a playwright is a poet disguised as an architect.

I believe a play is crafted. A play is designed. A play is planned.

Playwrights receive a lot of rejection letters. It's part of the deal we make in exchange for the Broadway premieres, the rave reviews and the Hollywood offers that come our way when the world is just and bright. The most valuable letter I ever received from a theater came in the form of a rejection. The letter was a polite, personal one (as opposed to personalized—“Dear JEFF HATCHER, Thank you so much for sending play title here. We all felt it was a very moving/funny/interminable piece of theater.”). The letter had lots of complimentary things to say about my work, but the penultimate sentence was one I'll never forget—nor should anyone writing for the theater.

“While there was much to recommend your script, in the end we did not feel compelled to produce it.” (My italics.)

There is no other good reason to produce a play.

Why do commercial producers and nonprofit artistic directors produce a play? There are many reasons, but the best is because the play compels them. Because they must produce it. Because they have to. Because something in the playwright's voice and ideas and talent insists they do. Because their artistic souls will shrivel and die if they don't. A play should be produced because the producer couldn't put it down—and couldn't wait to get it on its feet in front of an audience.

Your goal is to write that play. Maybe you want your play to right a wrong or expiate a guilt or tickle a funny bone or change the world. Fine. But remember this question, one Dr. R. Elliott Stout, my theater professor at Denison University, had framed above his desk: “AND WHAT IS THE AUDIENCE DOING ALL THIS TIME?” David Mamet, who wrote such great plays as Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo, once noted that the two hours an audience spends at the performance of a play is a lot to ask of a person's life. Count the hours spent in the dark by even the most infrequent theatergoer and by the time he reaches eighty-three years of age, you'll find he'd like a lot of those hours back. Our job in the theater is to make that octogenarian regret not one moment he's spent in the dark.

Think of the times you've gone to the theater at the end of a long, tense, tiring day. You got the ticket for some godforsaken reason, and as the clock ticks toward eight, you want nothing more than to leave the theater and get home as soon as possible. You look at the program and are horrified to find the production has not one but two intermissions. You won't be home until eleven or twelve. You look for the exit, but before you can make your move, the crowd grows silent, the lights go down, and you're trapped in your row. You know in your bones it's wrong to yell “fire.” And then it's forty minutes later, the lights are up, the crowd is moving to the lobby, and all you can think about is how excited you are to find out what's going to happen in the second act. You go back to your seat well before the curtain goes up again because you don't want to miss a beat. Suddenly it's the second intermission, and you don't leave your seat this time because you're actually talking about the play with the stranger next to you. Then the lights go down again, and before you know it the curtain call is over; the actors have left the stage, and you're still applauding. You're still sitting in your seat. You don't want to leave the theater. And you're trying to remember the last time a play made you feel that way.

That's our job as playwrights. That's what we do. We compel tired people, who have every reason to leave, to stay in their seats. And love staying. And come back for the next one.

These days it's tough for a new play to be produced in this country. Tough for experienced playwrights and more than intimidating for the struggling writer—the comer who keeps coming but never seems to arrive, or the novice without a church. But that's a challenge the talented, ambitious writer meets head-on. The tougher climate simply means our plays have to be better. So we'll make them better. We'll write the plays the audience stays for. We'll write the plays that compel.

This book can help you start writing plays that compel. It is not a how-to-get-produced manual or a history-of-the-drama text or a balanced overview of every kind of theater writing on this planet. It is a discussion of what I think works. It is a discussion of the questions I have to ask myself every time I think about writing a play, the questions any good playwright has to keep in mind when creating a character, planning a story, plotting a scene, or just hoping for magic to strike.

It is a book about craft. Plays are not about craft. But playwriting is. Plays are about Character, Action, Conflict and Ideas. Plays are about Stories—how they're told and what they mean in our experience of the world. Plays are about Language and Images. Plays are about Imagination and Discovery and Recognition. Plays are about Emotion. Plays are about the Mind. Plays are about the intimate collaboration that takes place between the Stage and the Audience in Time and Space, in Sound and Light and the Senses. Plays are about the Human Heart.

What plays are “about” can't be taught. A writer has to have “it,” whatever “it” is—talent, genius, something to say. But without the techniques dramatists have employed for over two thousand years, without a grasp of play writing craft—a grasp so firm it must become a reflex—talent can atrophy and die. Craft is the vehicle of talent and the imagination.

The first chapters of this book—on drama, theater, and the six elements of Aristotle—are designed to provide the foundation you'll need before you begin writing your play. After this, we'll move on to a discussion of where play ideas come from and how they find their dramatic and theatrical form. Next we look at structure and offer a three-part model for writing a play. This is followed by a chapter on dialogue. After that, we'll analyze a well-known classic play-script, Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler. The back of the book is devoted to three interviews with writers Lee Blessing (A Walk in the Woods), Marsha Norman ('Night, Mother) and José Rivera (Marisol). We'll see what these playwrights have to say about the challenges they encounter in writing their own plays, offering advice, tips and tricks-of-the-trade. Each of the early chapters is followed by a series of exercises designed to underline the concepts and craft issues detailed in the text. The exercises are essential in developing the mind, muscles and coordination necessary to successfully construct and write stageworthy drama. They are exercises in tension and conflict; wants, needs, desires; theatricality; subtext; stage space; imagination; action; and ideas. They are intended to keep the writer in the right dramatic and theatrical frame of mind. And if they happen to lead to a real scene or play, all the better.

The ideas in this book come from various sources. They come from my experience of writing for the theater. They come from the classes I've taught and the students I've had the privilege to meet. They come from talking to other playwrights—successful playwrights, struggling playwrights, playwrights who have made a difference in my writing and my life. They come from over thirty years of attending plays in the theater. They come from studying scores of plays, many of which are referred to in this book as we analyze what playwrights do to create dynamic drama and exciting theater. There are hundreds of plays we could use for our reference, but for the sake of economy and concentration, we'll cite about a dozen well-known dramas from various eras that represent a wide cross-section of styles and approaches. Thus, you will find frequent references to the following plays: Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen, The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, The Little Foxes by Lillian Hellman, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee, 'Night, Mother by Marsha Norman, The Odd Couple by Neil Simon, Betrayal by Harold Pinter, and Six Degrees of Separation by John Guare.

A class I've always wanted to teach would be one called “Plays We Like.” It would consist of smart playwrights talking about the plays they've always cherished. We'd read the plays, discuss them, and I think we'd find that these great plays have a lot in common.

That's what this book is about. Finding the tools, methods and strategies held in common by plays we like, plays that work, plays that delight and move us. Finding the common threads and the constant factors in plays that appear, at face value, to be completely dissimilar. What is the common structural thread that connects Hamlet to The Odd Couple? What is the constant character factor in both Hedda Gabler and Richard III? What similar playwriting twist is found in both The Front Page and Hedda Gabler?

Well?

If I told you in the introduction, you wouldn't be compelled to read on.

And I wouldn't be a dramatist.